The Scary Lawyer Guy Blog: March 2022

To critics of his presidency, Bill Clinton would often ask, “what part of the 90s did you not like, the peace or the prosperity?” It is a glib rejoinder I was reminded of while reading Chuck Klosterman’s recently-released book The Nineties. Clinton is discussed at length twice in the book, first, as a candidate who brought forth a wave of youthful enthusiasm to flush out the conservative Reagan-Bush era only to see the promise of important public policy like universal health care dashed in favor of small bore ideas like “V” chips and school uniforms, and then as a sex pest whose wanton behavior looks worse today than it did at the time. In other words, Klosterman reframes what has become the conventional wisdom of political journalists and historians alike about a man who is still alive and whose presidency ended less than 25 years ago. Long before Shephard Fairey’s iconic Obama Hope poster, Clinton was literally the man from Hope, but he squandered all that talent over a grimy affair, the excruciating details of which were exposed in public for all to read. The end.

And do not get me wrong, like most conventional wisdom, there is a patina of truth at the core of this critique. After the seeming never-ending cycle of calamities our nation has been through in the 21^st century – terrorism, climate disasters, wars, financial collapses, and a pandemic – a prosperous, peaceful time in our nation’s history may as well feel like 1,000 years ago. Millions of adults who were alive during the economic boom are now dead while millions of others were not yet alive (or too young to remember). A sex scandal on the other hand, especially one involving a President, still resonates in a culture that has become even more tabloid-like in the intervening years.

Indeed, to the extent that Clinton’s presidency is examined these days, be it on podcasts like Slow Burn or a miniseries like Impeachment: American Crime Story, the affair is the only topic that is discussed. To borrow another piece of conventional wisdom, there is a right wing media and a mainstream media in America. The former arose as a reaction to Clinton’s presidency, accused him of being everything from a rapist, to a drug runner, to a murderer, and has a vested interest in history’s verdict on him being harsh. The latter had an awful relationship with Clinton (David Broder, the so-called “dean” of the White House press corps, once huffed “He [Clinton] came here and trashed the place [Washington] and it is not his place.”) that began before he even took office and stretched into both of Hillary’s two runs for President. In other words, there is an exceedingly small universe of reporters or historians interested in telling the whole story of Clinton’s presidency and lots and lots of people who despise him personally, professionally, or both. So it is no surprise that Clinton’s job performance (which, even during the height of the scandal hovered in the mid-to-high 60s, an unheard of number for a Democratic president deep into his second term) has receded from the public’s collective memory, while disgust with his personal conduct (which, at the height of the scandal was rightly judged as abhorrent) has only solidified with time, effectively making him a political pariah who is synonymous with sexual predation.

While the former President does not need some rando on the internet to defend his record, he has been left to do it on his own. Which is odd because he actually achieved many of the things his political opponents fetishize. To take the most obvious examples, while Republicans claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, Clinton is the only President to run a surplus – he did it four times – in the past 50 years. Unlike Republicans who railed against the size of government but did things like create entire new bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, Clinton reduced the size of the federal workforce. The national debt was being paid down so rapidly due to Clinton’s economic boom, when he left office, it was on track to be paid off in full by 2009. The more than 23 million new jobs during his eight years dwarf the results of the four terms of Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump combined. He grew the economy more equitably than Reagan, with wages rising across the board and without handing massive tax cuts to the wealthy. And of course, unlike his Republican predecessors and successor, all of whom had recessions and/or stock market crashed under their watches, neither one occurred with Clinton at the helm.

But the inequity in Clinton’s treatment is seen most obviously when the inevitable pushback to his lengthy list of achievements is made (I did not even mention the assault weapons ban that he got passed in 1994 and which any Democrat can only dream of getting reenacted in 2022, the two middle east peace agreements, or putting an end to the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland). The most obvious is that Clinton’s personal conduct was gross and his impeachment, the first of a sitting President since the 1860s, merits the focus it is still given. But if infidelity is justification for obsessive reportage, its application is not universal. FDR carried on a long-term affair while he was President (he literally died while spending time with his mistress) yet Lucy Mercer is not a household name like Monica Lewinsky. JFK basically used the White House as a shag pad, but his esteem in the press remains unvarnished almost 60 years since his death and largely based on a fictional reimagining of his presidency. He has been given a far more charitable pass for conduct equally bad (if not worse) than Clinton’s even though his brief time in office was uneven to say the least (yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a high water mark but arguably occurred because of his bananas approval of the Bay of Pigs. He was late to the civil rights cause, etc.) When historians ranked these mens’ presidencies for C-SPAN, Kennedy landed at eighth, Clinton 19^th.

By the same token, if wrong doing in office is your metric, consider Ronald Reagan (9^th in the C-SPAN poll), who was caught red-handed selling arms to the Iranian government in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and then taking the proceeds from those arms sales and funneling that money to Central American “freedom” fighters – all in contravention of federal law. That Reagan escaped any serious consequences (he shifted some staff people around, claimed a faulty memory for things he approved and the people who did get prosecuted were either pardoned or got off on technicalities) at the time was a testament to the good will he had earned, but his conduct was objectively more egregious than Clinton’s. The passage of time of these two scandals have been the opposite – Iran-Contra is long forgotten while Lewinsky remains top of mind. As such, the hagiography of Reagan presiding over a Morning Again In America era has been cemented while his wrongdoing has been forgotten. The same right wing media types who think Clinton is Satan-incarnate revere Reagan as Mount-Rushmore-eligible, while mainstream historians hand Reagan singular credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union (a debatable point made moot when you can just argue that Reagan said “tear down this wall”and lo and behold, not only did that wall come down four years later, but the whole Communist regime dissolved shortly thereafter) and soft-pedal his culpability in Iran-Contra, not to mention his refusal to oppose apartheid, address the AIDS crisis, or the hollowing out of social service programs, all of which he did too.

If you want to argue that “peace and prosperity” are not sufficient grounds to lionize a President, allow me to introduce you to Dwight Eisenhower (who, not for anything, is alleged to have also had an affair, albeit while he was commanding our forces in Europe, not while he was in the White House), who clocks in at 5^th (!) in C-SPAN’s list in large part due to the country’s economic strength during his time in office. Of course, this was made much easier by the fact that Europe and Japan were still clearing the rubble from the second world war and China had just been taken over by Mao. The United States was the unquestioned global economic power in the 1950s; not so in the 1990s, and yet one man is flirting with the inner ring of presidential greatness while the other is lingering in the middle section.

To the extent that any serious debate over Clinton’s record takes place, Klosterman also cherry picks a popular progressive critique of Clinton that his repeal of the Glass-Steagall law resulted in the 2008 housing crisis. Putting aside what we in the law might call a proximate cause issue (that is, there were other intervening events between the repeal of the law and the economic calamity that ensued), Reagan signed a law allowing for the use of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) in home financing. ARMs were pointed to as one of the ways home owners were taken advantage of in the years leading up to the housing crisis, yet historians say little about this. And of course, Reagan blew up the debt and deficit, raised taxes multiple times, and had a deep recession and a stock market crash happen during his time in office, yet his death resulted in a week-long celebration of his life without any of this messy stuff being highlighted while the first paragraph of Clinton’s obituary will inevitably include the words “Monica Lewinsky.”

The rest, as they say, is open to debate. The now widely reviled crime bill made sense at the time but looks bad in retrospect. In 1991, just two years before the bill became law, more than 2200 people were killed in New York City. By 2000, that number was down to 673. By 2020, it was fewer than 500. That crime peaked in the early 1990s was not be known at the time and regardless, to ascribe all over-policing to that one law (and that one person) ignores the decision making of lots of other politicians at the federal and state level, not to mention the fact that at the time the concern over safety was a legitimate one.

And my point is that these arguments – which historians engage in when it comes to analyzing the presidencies of almost every other President over our nation’s 240 plus years, are somehow missing from an examination of Clinton’s two terms in office. And that does a disservice to the man and the historical record. Important things that happened in the 1990s (good and bad) have been cast aside or flushed down the memory hole because of the almost monomaniacal focus on a blow job. It might be easier to reduce this consequential time in history down to that, but it sure is not fair.

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